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The best thing about travel is that you get out of your comfort zone and you get to see how other people live and operate, and if you have your eyes and ears open, you learn a lot from those new experiences and observations.

The black beaches of Napier, New Zealand

About two years ago, Bob Hawley of Red Steel in Napier, New Zealand had started building his new fabricating facility, and purchased an Avenger PLUS from Ocean to position his shop ahead of his competition. This past trip I had the privilege of seeing Bob in his new state-of-the-art facility, and I got to see how he is positioning his business for future growth.

Red Steel – Napier, New Zealand

From the minute you arrive at the shop you can tell that Bob has tremendous pride in appearance, and the striking charcoal and red color scheme that greets you on the outside of the building, is carried through the entire facility. First impressions are important in business and Red Steel offers one of the most compelling first impressions you will ever see, and not just in the steel fabrication arena.

Red Steel’s front lobby

But it’s not just about appearances. Bob fully understands that the strength of his company is dependent on attracting and retaining the best employees and the effort and expense that he has put into the facility to cater to his employees is immediately apparent. A large, fully-appointed break room leads outside to an attractive covered barbecue area, protected from the cold winds that are common in New Zealand. And most importantly for a coffee connoisseur like myself, visitors are offered a range of gourmet espresso options and Bob has turned out to be quite the Barista!

Impact Machinery’s Robby Clark with Bob in the large break room

Covered outdoor employee break area

Bob and Ocean VP Danny Steyn enjoying some espresso at the Avenger PLUS

This level of detail is carried through to the fabricating facility, where every single fabricator is in control of his own crane, ensuring that he is fully productive. Bob tracks real time productivity with a range of software programs and I really enjoyed seeing the man-hour/ton variations across the massive range of work that Red Steel undertakes.

Every fabricator is in control of their own crane

Peddinghaus HSFDB being installed

And while I was there the Peddinghaus factory technician Rob Ganzer was installing Red Steel’s new fully loaded HSFDB plate line. All in all, a very impressive facility and one that will set itself apart for years to come. Thanks for the tour Bob!

Yes, the Ocean Avenger is known for drilling holes in beams and columns and adding layout marks for welded attachments, but it does so much more!

We have one customer who is using their Avenger to drill holes through both walls of 1.5” pipe. Have fun trying to do that with a mag drill!

Avenger drilling 1.5″ pipe

Another customer used to process all their flat bar on an iron worker, it worked, but it was an inefficient and labor intensive process. Now they put a 20 ft piece of flat bar on their Avenger and drill all the holes and add layout pop marks to indicate where to shear it, saving valuable time, money and man-hours.

The extreme versatility of the Avenger allows you to process all profiles up to 40” high. The possibilities are endless!

In the heart of Bulawayo Zimbabwe, a young couple, Eugene and Agnes Jackson, have created an amazing company called Pump and Steel Supplies, and in a few short years have grown it into a powerhouse of productivity, and now employ more than 300 personnel. They manufacture everything from Structural Steel to roofing materials to door and window frames, and everything in between.

Roofing manufacturing lines at Pump and Steel Supplies

They currently operate from a 300,000 sqft building, previously the railways workshop building, and have started to transform this facility from an essentially manual operation into a state of the art CNC automated manufacturing facility.

Peddinghaus 210AD Ironworker from 1971

One of the older machines in their floor is their trusty Peddinghaus 210AD Ironworker built in the Peddinghaus Germany factory back in 1971, and this machine still performs as well as it did when it was built, more than 46 years ago. This machine will now reside across from their most recent installation, a line featuring a dual column Terminator Band Saw and the formidable Ocean Avenger PLUS CNC Drill Line. And just across from the drill line is their new Ocean Clipper CNC Angle Line.

One senses that not only is Pump and Steel Supplies about to rewrite structural steel fabrication in the country, but the entire country of Zimbabwe is poised for a massive bounce as soon as investment capital rolls in. While the departing president Robert Mugabe might have been reviled, the one thing he really did well was invest in education of the citizens, and the talent and skill in Zimbabwe is ready to make their mark on the continent of Africa.

So, what do you do if a bulldozer has an untimely contact with a tree that destroys a vital ventilation screen?

Simple really, contact a steel fabricator that has an Avenger drill line! This is what happened to one of great customers, Gary Hobbs of GH engineering in Palmerstone New Zealand.

Damaged bulldozer ventilation screen

Gary looked at the original screen and said, “yeah mate, we can do this”, and put a 16mm thick steel plate on the Avenger table and let this versatile machine work its magic. Because the Avenger would have to drill more than 840 holes each 26mm (1”) in diameter, Gary reduced the feed rate of the machine, so as not to overheat the hydraulic fluid that would be continuously working,

Despite the reduced feed rate, his Avenger still completed this unusual job in only 2hours and 12 minutes, proving yet again just how versatile this amazing machine is.

We love seeing these great stories and inventive uses of our Ocean Avenger, so if you have an interesting story or project, please send them to us – email to info@oceanmachinery.com

It is always gratifying to visit our customers who have embraced our CNC solutions and have carved out a successful place for themselves in the competitive world of steel fabrication.

Danny Steyn with Cousins Steel machining specialist Jody de Bruin

On a recent trip to South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe, Ocean Machinery’s Vice President, Danny Steyn met with several customers including Cousins Steel who is one of the premier Kwazulu-Natal based steel fabricators located in Pietermaritzburg.

Cousins Steel implemented the Ocean Avenger and Ocean Clipper CNC solutions in 2011, and it was pleasing to see just how well the machines are maintained, despite the heavy usage.

Ocean Clipper – Cousins Steel, South Africa

Cousins Steel’s machining specialist Jody de Bruin, who meticulously maintains and operates the machines proudly showed us the Avenger, Clipper and Rejuvenator drill grinder. Steyn remarked to De Bruin that it was possibly the cleanest and best maintained drill sharpener that he had seen in almost a thousand installations.

When Steyn asked De Bruin how the Avenger had been performing he replied that apart from one recent valve issue, the machine has performed flawlessly for over 6 years, and stated that he was getting over 2,000 holes per sharpening on the standard Ocean Penetrator Drill Bits.

Cousins Steel, South Africa

These are the stories that we love to share with our customers, dealers and prospects. Nothing makes us more proud than to see machines working hard in our customer’s shops.

All Ocean products are designed to be fully-functional stand-alone machines that exhibit amazing productivity and versatility in their own right, and are designed to fit into very compact spaces since most of our customers are pressed for space. However, they are also fully capable of being integrated into fully-functional systems for those customers who have the space to implement them. This can be done at any time in a step-by-step approach as needs require and as funds become available.

We are finding more and more customers using the Avenger (and Avenger PLUS) drill line to not only drill and layout their beams, but also to measure the beam for cutting to length and coping. We often see our machines in a system layout where the Avenger drills, lays out and measures, and the Terminator cuts to length.

Ocean Liberator integrated with Avenger Drill Line

But for those customers who have a significant percentage of their work that also needs to be coped, an Avenger or Avenger PLUS in tandem with the Liberator CNC Coper is even more versatile. These customers use the drill line to place the location reference marks and then use the Liberator to not only cope the beams, but also to cut to length.

Just outside Fresno in Northern California, Steve Bradford of Bradford Steel started off with an Avenger and then subsequently added a Liberator to cope and cut to length. He installed cross transfers to facilitate loading the Avenger and added idler rollers to the drill table, making it easier to feed the beams into the coper. His future plans include additional cross transfers integrated with the outfeed of the Liberator to further speed up production, and the integration of an Ocean Blaster to further reduce costs and improve profitability.

Material handling integrated with Avenger Drill Line

Ocean Machinery provides full CAD layout drawings of an entire system in your location, showing you how the various products can all be integrated in the future. This step-by-step modular approach to machine integration means that you never have to invest too much at one time; just add machines as needed.

Call us today toll free at 1-800-286-3624 or at 1-954-956-3131. We look forward to helping you create a customized fully functional integrated system for your shop.

One of Ocean’s newest Avenger Drill Line customers, J&C Steel Fabricators, in Brooklyn, New York, is extremely pleased with what the Avenger Drill Line can do. It has also drastically lowered production costs, minimized shop floor errors and shown an immediate return on their investment.

Cesar Velesaca, President J&C Steel Fabricators (center) with members of his crew and Tom Doyle of Doyle Structural Solutions

They neatly placed their machine against the wall where the steel supply truck backs into the bay to unload parallel to the Avenger.

Avenger Drill Line positioned so trucks can unload parallel to table

The position of the Avenger makes loading and unloading on the truck easy

One of our Avenger PLUS customers drilling a large pre-welded assembly.

There are situations that occur in fabrication that necessitate the pre-welding of an assembly and then the subsequent drilling of that assembly. This is normally due to one or more concerns that if the holes are drilled prior to welding, that:

The contraction and distortion of the material as it cools down from welding, might cause the hole-to-hole accuracy to be compromised, and

The actual welding of the pre-drilled components might not be perfectly aligned, thus compromising the hole-to-hole accuracy

The Avenger and Avenger PLUS machines, by virtue of the static work-piece and moving processing column, allow fabricators to position and drill pre-welded structures on their machines.

This is not something that you can even consider on a typical multi-spindle drill line or coping robot.

We would love to see other photos of our customers drilling pre-welded assemblies – please email them to greg@oceanmachinery.com

These days it is almost impossible to be competitive using a slow manual approach to fabricating, especially when manually measuring & laying out copes, then burning them by hand. Plus there is additional grinding and cleaning of the cope adding additional costs to the process.

This means you have way too many man-hours in each cut or cope. What you really need is a more economical, and more accurate solution that does your coping and notching cleaner and much faster, ensuring you make a larger margin on your bids.

Learn how the Ocean Liberator can make you MONEY by coping your pieces significantly faster and cheaper than doing it by hand or with a robotic plasma coper.

Ocean Machinery, along with its manufacturing partner Peddinghaus and its local dealer Impact Machinery, exhibited the Ocean Liberator CNC Beam Coping machine at the recent Austech trade show in Melbourne Australia.

The Ocean Liberator drew huge crowds at Austech

The simplicity of the Liberator and the ease in which it copes all types of copes made it an instant hit at the show. Its compact size, affordable price explains why it is so popular worldwide and why it is used in both large structural shops as well as all steel fabricators doing a mix of structural and miscellaneous metals.

The Ocean Liberator’s copes require little to no grinding

Of course the legendary Oceanettes added a dose of light relief and were a big hit, signing their calendars and posing with the multitude of visitors.

The world famous Oceanettes down under at Austech 2017

Vice President Danny Steyn and the Oceanettes with the Ocean Liberator

To learn more about the Ocean Liberator CNC beam coping machine call Ocean Machinery today or visit us on the web at www.oceanmachinery.com